Sustained Investigation #15

Along my many journeys at Alzar, we had expedition blocks that lasted for two weeks straight in the wilderness. While in Parque Patagonia in Chile, my friends and I would often plunge into the rivers or streams that we came across in efforts to catch the fish that were swimming up stream. Seeing this, I took the opportunity to express my investigation and link this experience with skateboarding. I chose to make this art because this experience was one that stuck with me from my trip.

This was made by cutting the shape of the skateboard out of a piece of poplar wood, from a new design that I made myself by stretching the shape from my 9th sustained investigation. Then I began to sand it to refine the shape and bevel the edges of the board all around. Using skateboard trucks I lined them up on the board and centered them to the center line, and proceeded to drill the holes making sure to counter sink for the bolts. Then I started painting with a blue wash to show the grain through and began to build up the layers with different tones and highlights, not necessarily going off of any fish in particular, but just having fun with it. I went from the back with the base colors of the fish like green and tan, and slowly worked forwards adding details. To finish it off and make it look more clean, I added a black border all around and signed the bottom of it.

In this artwork, I used color in all of the colors I mixed together to get the image I was looking for and value in all of the different values of the colors I made to get shadows and highlights. I used texture and form a lot in the way I made the scales on the fish and how I used the shape of the board. My project evolved because I originally went into this thinking I would make it like all of the others; however, I am beginning to get bored of this repetition so I decided to change it up and have fun with this one. Next time, I think I could look at a specific fish and try to paint it realistically.